HotmailGrade-school Lolita: ‘So Sexy So Soon’
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Sexual harassment at age 5?
Jason got into trouble one day when his kindergarten classmate Ashley came home from school and reported to her parents that Jason had told her that he wanted to “have sex” with her. Ashley’s parents, very upset, told her she should never play with Jason again, that he was a bad boy. They then contacted the teacher and the principal and demanded a meeting with Jason’s parents. All of the adults involved were concerned about what might be going on in Jason’s home for him to come up with such a comment at the age of five. In some circumstances, such comments from young children can be an indication of sexual abuse. The principal, a firm believer in the school’s Zero Tolerance policy that said any child who committed an act of aggression or violence was subject to suspension, was considering a brief suspension to teach Jason that he should never say such a thing.
Fortunately for little Jason, the school psychologist met with him before this could happen. She told him that some people were worried about what he said to Ashley. She asked him if he would tell her what he said and what he had wanted to do to Ashley. Jason instantly burst into tears. He sobbed, “I wanted to kiss her. I like her. I like her.” This was the first time anyone had bothered to ask Jason what he meant by what he said, a potentially damaging error on the part of the adults. They were all using an adult lens for interpreting what he said about sex, not a child’s lens. Often when adults think “sex,” children have something very different on their minds.
An important question to ask in this situation is to what degree Jason’s comment grew out of his efforts to make sense of the messages about affection, sex, and relationships that he might be getting every day from popular culture. While it is hard to answer this question in hindsight, in these times it’s probably safe to assume that the popular culture could very well have played a significant role. Had it not been for the school psychologist, he might have been punished for doing something he’d learned and internalized from those messages. Jason, as much a victim of the sexualized popular culture as Ashley, was also victimized by the adults’ fear and misunderstanding.
We can only be grateful that the psychologist found a way to connect with Jason, to hear his point of view. We can hope that Jason got the kind of support he needed to regain his self-confidence and to learn how to express affection for his peers in appropriate ways. We also hope that Ashley got help working through the misguided and disturbing response she got to Jason’s words from the adults around her.
A highly publicized story about a first-grader in the Boston area did not have such a happy ending. A boy was suspended from school for a week when a girl in his class reported that he touched her skin inside the waistband of the back of her pants. The Zero Tolerance policy in his school left no room to take into account the understanding or possible needs of this seven-year-old child. Once again, here is a child paying a high price for the new sexualized childhood and adults’ reaction to it. And both stories illustrate a very disturbing trend — as adults get more and more uptight about how the sexualized environment is affecting children, they end up ascribing adult intent to behaviors that would have been interpreted as “children just being children” in the past.
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Premature adolescent rebellion
The big topic of conversation for Tessa’s eighth birthday was the upcoming party — a sleepover with her three best friends and a magic show for entertainment. Tessa and her father had been learning magic tricks together and Tessa was excited about this new skill. Both parents were enthusiastic about the magic show too, since they had been afraid Tessa would want to show her birthday guests a DVD for entertainment. It was always a problem to choose an appropriate one. At the party, the magic show was a big hit, and Tessa taught her appreciative friends how to do the tricks. But later in the evening the bubble burst for the parents.
After ice cream and cake, the girls retired to Tessa’s bedroom to get ready for bed. About a half hour later Tessa’s mother, Kate, quietly went into the hallway to see how they were doing. Through the bedroom door, left slightly ajar, she overheard a conversation that took her breath away. The girls were talking about what Cassie, a girl in their class who was not at the party, had worn to school that day — a midriff shirt that exposed her belly button. Kendra said, “My mom says I can’t have one. I keep telling her it’s not fair.” MacKenzie said without hesitation that her mom let her choose the clothes she wanted and Kendra’s mom was really mean for not letting Kendra choose her clothes. Emily agreed. Tessa seemed not to be participating much. As Kate continued to eavesdrop, she learned that “the boys like Cassie.” They chase her on the playground, and one of the boys actually ran up to her and kissed her! Kate also learned that the boy is Cassie’s “boyfriend” now, and he likes her because she’s “sexy.”
The girls talked on and on — about how it wasn’t fair that Cassie got to wear whatever she wanted. Even MacKenzie and Emily, who had shirts that showed off their belly buttons, complained that they couldn’t wear them to school. Furthermore, the girls then discussed how they could get their parents to let them wear these shirts to school. MacKenzie and Emily gave Tessa and Kendra advice about how they could bypass their parents by getting their grandparents to buy them belly button shirts. All the girls agreed that grandparents often buy things that parents won’t buy.
MacKenzie boasted that she had seen a copy of the magazine CosmoGIRL! at her teenage cousin’s house. It showed really skinny models wearing really short belly button shirts that were “sooooo cool.” There was even an article on dieting. This led Tessa to pipe up, proudly announcing that she was on a diet and that she was going to be really skinny. The other girls said they were going to go on diets too. Kate wondered how Kendra, who was in fact somewhat overweight and had fallen strangely silent, felt about this discussion.
Kate was stricken. She was appalled that eight-year-olds were thinking and talking about such things. She thought that such topics — worrying about being sexy, skinny, and popular with boys and trying to figure out how to trick parents — didn’t emerge until early adolescence at twelve or thirteen. She wanted to barge into the bedroom and tell the girls that they were far too young to have such concerns. She wanted to tell them to go to sleep! But rationally Kate knew that even if she did march in to voice her concerns, the issues raised in the girls’ conversation would not go away. Rather, they would just stay underground as the girls continued to try to understand these issues beneath the radar of critical adults.
Many questions were spinning around in Kate’s head, none very comforting. First, she wondered about the girls’ envy of Cassie and their desire to be “sexy” and popular with boys, like her. Weren’t the girls a little young to be thinking about themselves and their peers in terms of sexiness bringing popularity? They were talking about one another and Cassie as if they were objects who would be judged entirely by their looks and whether or not their clothing was sexy. Second, Kate was concerned about the seemingly strong peer pressure in the group to look a certain way and to judge themselves and one another by their success in that narrow effort.
But Kate was most upset that the children were talking about adults, their parents, as if they were “the enemy,” opponents who prevented them from buying and wearing what they needed to be happy and successful. This seemed like adolescent behavior to her. Of course, one of the developmental tasks of adolescents is to separate from their parents and become more independent as friends and peers play increasingly important roles. Kate understood this in theory. But weren’t these children a bit young to be starting their adolescent rebellion? Was this a premature adolescent rebellion? Was this the age compression she had heard about, where issues that used to be of relevance to older children were moving down to younger and younger children?
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